Workshop on Workshops is a two-day symposium. Realized in the framework of the 20th year of the CSAV – Artists Research Laboratory, the aim of this fist appointment is to discuss and question existing models for art education and artistic practice.

In recent years residencies, workshops, alternative exhibition spaces, temporary and / or informal schools have become part of the contemporary art map, expanding the variety of its formats and extending the geography of its borders. Invited exponents from international institutions - artists and curators - will focus on discussing post-academic research within artistic practice in the context of residency programmes, workshops and alternative educational practice. The debate will revolve around the experience of individuals, collectives, institutions dedicated to autonomous contemporary art production, where thought is posited within a space of development, flexibility and permeability. Simultaneously the workshop will reflect on the dimension of learning as a central process in the art field in order to rethink the borders and the contexts of institutions.

Workshop on Workshops is curated by Annie Ratti and Lorenzo Benedetti. The symposium will take place at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como on the Friday 20th and Saturday 21st of November 2015.

Lorenzo Benedetti
Lorenzo Benedetti (b.1972, Rome, Italy) is since 2014 director and curator of de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam. He was director of Art Center De Vleeshal, Middelburg, in the Netherlands, and curator of the Dutch Pavilion for the 55th Biennale of Venice in 2013. He studied Art history at the University La Sapienza in Rome and in 1999 attended the "Curatorial Training Programme" at De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam. In 2005 he founded the Sound Art Museum in Rome, a space dedicated to sound in visual art. He has been the director of the art centre Volume! in Rome and a curator at the Museum Marta Herford, in Herford, Germany. He was guest curator at La Kunsthalle in Mulhouse, France. Recent exhibition are "During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Close", Wiels, Bruxelles, "Also Sculpture Die", Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. He writes regularly in magazines and exhibition catalogues.

Annie Ratti
Annie Ratti lives and works in London. Through a transdisciplinary practice, her work transforms the private experience in a public moment, reflecting on contemporary issues, questioning and discussing preconceptions and the definition of scientific knowledge privileging positions and theories marginal to the institutional thought. The shared dimension of her practice emerges from collaborations with other artists (Bruna Esposito , Peter Lewis, Arto Lindsay) and in the creation of CSAV (artists research laboratory), that she is directing at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, founded on the idea of dialogue and exchange between artists of different generations and nationalities, in the hope for creating a shared artistic and didactic experience.Recent exhibitions: Self: Portraits of Artists in their absence, National Academy Museum, New York (2015), /seconds, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, Emirati Arabi Uniti (2014), Pure Water, Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria (2014), The Shroom Project, De Kabinetten van de Vleeshal, Middelburg, Olanda (2013), In Water, I Understand, Venice Biennale Collateral Event (2013), WOOD GLASS PAPER, Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome (2013).

Photo: Manuel Versaen

Dirk Snauwaert
Dirk Snauwaert (b. 1963, Tielt, Belgium) has been involved with WIELS Contemporary Art centre since July 2004; he was appointed Artistic Director in January 2005. Before joining WIELS, Dirk Snauwaert was Co-Director of the Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alps, in France, where he was in charge of the exhibition programme and of the development of the FRAC Rhône-Alpes collection. He was Director of the Munich Kunstverein from 1996 to 2001, and, from 1989 to 1995, he was in charge of the contemporary art programme of the Société des Expositions of the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels. He has organised and coordinated numerous exhibitions, both monographic and thematic, and he lectures and publishes regularly on art and visual culture. He has been a member of several boards, including the Flemish Community's Visual Arts Advisory Board, and he was also in charge of the acquisitions for Belgium's Flemish Community from 2003 till 2006. He was a member of AFAA's think tank, in Paris, and has sat on several juries, among them the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogram, Munch Prize Oslo, Blue Orange and the Prix Marcel Duchamp. He's also on the board of acquisitions for the FRAC des Pays de la Loire, in Carquefou, France, APT Berlin, the Kuratorium der Allianz Kulturstiftung and the Generali Foundation, both in Vienna. For Wiels, he has curated exhibitons by Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven, Bruno Serralongue, Luc Tuymans, Andro Wekua and Francis Alÿs, and groups shows such as Expats-Clandestines (2007) and Rehabilitation (2010). He was also the curator of Jef Geys' exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial.

Angie Keefer
Angie Keefer is an artist, writer, editor, and publisher. She produces objects, moving images, scripts, texts, talks, performances, and publications, often in collaboration with other artists. Her work is currently on view as part of Greater New York, MoMA PS1. She has recently exhibited, staged, published, and spoken at Kunstverein Munich (2015); Liverpool Biennial (2014); Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2013-14); Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2013); and São Paulo Biennial (2012), among others. In 2010, Keefer co-founded The Serving Library, a not-for-profit artists’ organization dedicated to publishing and archiving in a continuous loop, and is co-editor of The Serving Library’s bi-annual publication, The Bulletins. She graduated from Yale University, where she studied sculpture. She teaches listening at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and lives in rural upstate New York.

Jakob Jakobsen
Jakob Jakobsen is a visual artist, as well as a political and educational organizer. He was involved in setting up the Copenhagen Free University (2001-2007), he cofounded the artist-run TV station tvtv (2005) and has participated in exhibitions and seminars all over the world. Most recently he presented the installation The Revolution Must Be A School of Unfettered Thought at the 31st Bienal of São Paulo, 2014.

Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas (b. 1936 in New York, USA) is one of the first artists to combine video and performance and is the author of reference books on performance art. Since the 1960s she has explored the theme of identity and the relationship between the body and its representation. Jonas is currently representing the United States of America at the 56th Venice Biennale with a new commission presented by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts. Jonas has taught at MIT since 1998, and is currently Professor Emerita in the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology within the School of Architecture and Planning.

Photo: Maschek S.

Matt Mullican
Matt Mullican (born September 18th, 1951 in Santa Monica, California) is an American artist who for over four decades has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language and signification. New York and Berlin based, Mullican has always been interested in the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it. Mullican’s work has been exhibited internationally since the early 1970s in venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; National Galerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; his work was also included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and in the Venice Biennale in 2003. Mullican has taught and lectured at: Columbia University, New York; The Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam; Chelsea College of Art and Design, London; University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg.

Teresa Gleadowe
Teresa Gleadowe is a curator, writer and editor with extensive experience in the UK and internationally. She worked as an Exhibition Officer and then as Assistant Director of the Visual Arts Department of the British Council before being appointed Head of Information at the Tate Gallery. In 1992 she joined the academic staff of the Royal College of Art to develop the first UK-based MA in curating, which she directed until 2006.Teresa was Research Consultant and Series Editor for the Exhibition Histories series published by Afterall and has taught on curatorial programmes internationally. She was Chair of Nottingham Contemporary, and has been a specialist adviser to the John Lyon’s Charity. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Peer, a Trustee of Kneehigh Theatre and of the Kestle Barton Trust. She is also Executive Chair of CAST, an arts organisation based in Helston, Cornwall.Teresa Gleadowe initiated The Falmouth Convention held at University College Falmouth in 2010 and The Penzance Convention held at Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange in 2012. She is also responsible for an ongoing series of residential Workshops at Kestle Barton on the Lizard peninsula. She is currently working on a proposal for a three-year programme of activity in Cornwall entitled Groundwork.

Marta Kuzma
Marta Kuzma is a curator, writer, lecturer, and currently the Vice Chancellor for the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, a post she assumed in August 2014. Previously, Kuzma had been the Director for the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, a research driven foundation for contemporary art from 2005 through 2013 where she realized research projects that included ‘Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?’ – a survey into the juncture of the political and erotic as located within the countercultural movements of the 1960s. Kuzma was part of the curatorial team for Documenta 13 under Carolyn Christov Bakargiev an she also co-curated Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain in addition to numerous other international exhibition projects reflecting wider research initiatives. She has served as the founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, Ukraine; director of the WPA/Corcoran, in Washington, DC; and director for International Exhibitions Programme at the International Center for Photography in NYC.A graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University, NYC, and a postgraduate of Art Theory and Aesthetics from the Centre for Modern European Philosophy/Middlesex University in London, Kuzma has been a visiting professor of theory in the postgraduate department of visual arts at the University of IUAV in Venice and is a visiting professor to the Bocconi University in Milan. Kuzma contributes regularly to various international journals and publications including Radical Philosophy and Afterall in London.Kuzma serves on the Editorial Board of London based publication Afterall and on the scientific committee of the Ratti Foundation in Como.

Portrait by Sterling Bartlett

Andrew Berardini
Andrew Berardini writes about the permeability between imagination and reality in mostly fictive essays and essayistic fiction, as well as often about the art of Los Angeles where he lives. He has been a lecturer at the Mountain School of Arts since 2008. An occasional curator, Andrew has organized with collaborators a metaphysical disco at the Church of the Holy Shroud in Turin, a Latin American chain letter at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and a slightly anarchistic metafiction at the UKS in Oslo. Formerly an assistant editor at Semiotext(e), he is currently a contributing editor for Artslant, Momus, Art-Agenda, and Mousse as well as a founding editor of The Art Book Review. A finalist for the Premio Bonaldi Award for young curators and winner of an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Grant for Art Writers in 2013, he was recently awarded with Martha Kirszenbaum and Jesse McKee a 221a Curatorial Residency Grant. Berardini has a memoir-ish book forthcoming from Mousse Publishing on the artist Danh Vo, and is currently at work on another book about color.

Roberto Pinto
Roberto Pinto taught "History of Art" at Accademia Albertina, Turin; Academy of Art of Florence; Accademia Carrara, Bergamo; and Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan. From February 2006, he started to work as a researcher at the University of Trento and from November 2012 at the University of Bologna. Since December 1988 he has worked at Flash Art magazine, first as an editor and then from January 1993 to March 1996 as chief editor. He has also being writing for Artis, Papier Libre, Art in America, Janus, Tema Celeste, Juliet, Correnti di Marea, Il Giornale dell’Arte, Luci e Design, Linea d’ombra, and for Il Manifesto e L’Unita. Since 1993 he collaborates with Radio Popolare.Among his writing are: Lucy Orta, Phaidon, London 2003, Nuove Geografie Artistiche. Le mostre al tempo della globalizzazione, Postmediabooks, Milan 2012.Among the exhbition he has been curating are: Subway, 1998 Milan; Arte all'arte 2000; Transform, 2001, Trieste; Short Stories, 2001, Milan; Americas Remixed, 2002 Milan; Dimensione Follia, 2004 Galleria Civica di Trento, Spazi Atti (with J.H. Martin), 2004 PAC, Milan; Confini (in collaboration with Cincinelli and Collu) Museo Provinciale Nuoro 2006.He has also curated eight editions of the contemporary art symposium La generazione delle immagini and has been the curator of: V Biennial of Gwangju, Korea (2004), III Biennial of Tirana (2005), the X/XI/XII/XIII Edition of CSAV – Artists Research Lavoratory of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como. Currently he is the senior curator of the project Artline (Permanent sculpture park) for the City of Milan.